


The Chocolate Sound

by somekindofseizure



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Car Makeout, F/M, First Kiss, Syzygy, prompts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-19
Updated: 2016-09-19
Packaged: 2018-08-16 01:27:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8081326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somekindofseizure/pseuds/somekindofseizure
Summary: Came off a a prompt for the words leather, chocolate, and journal.  It takes place after Syzygy.





	

 

A thick midnight haze obscured the road and petulantly held the future hostage.  Scully’s eyes strained as her hands squeezed the steering wheel, comforted by its strict contours and padded vinyl.  Her fingers rippled and gripped tighter, ten hungry lovers clutching at manmade flesh and bone.  Beside her, Mulder stammered through the faint smell of liquor and his (apparently) favorite perfume.  She let her foot fall heavy on the pedal.  Behind them, civilization was falling around two bickering teenagers.

“Scully, you just blew through a stop sign.”

“Shut up, Mulder.”

Her knees grazed the wheel.  She’d chased her feelings at first with a cigarette, and then harder, with a stiff yank of the seat lever, and it had slid dramatically toward the dashboard.  She could not bring herself to pull over and fix it.  She’d take achy knees over any show of weakness.  These dark interstate roads were their jungle, and there were rules all the same.

“It’s really dangerous to ignore a stop sign in general, but in weather like this –”

She took a deep breath in lieu of strangling him and mumbled back.

“Mulder, I need some quiet time –”

“Are you still mad at me?  You saw what happened with Terri and Margi.  Best friends should not fight.”  Only Mulder could be sanctimonious, sentimental and nonsensical at the same time.

“I’m not your best friend.”

“Yes you are.”

“Mulder, please.  Shut up.”

“You said that already.”

“Don’t you have something better to do than pester me?”

“We’re in the car, what am I going to do?”

“I don’t know.  Take a nap.  Put the radio on.  Start journaling about your date with Detective White.”

She straightened in her seat as he quieted, determined to make the comment seem deliberate.

“Scully.”  Eighteen seconds.  That’s how long Mulder was capable of shutting up for.  “She showed up, she was grieving.  Then she kind of… but I was going to…”

“You were going to be wearing a leather cat collar and meowing in a matter of five minutes.”  

“The collar wasn’t leather.”

“Not the point, Mulder.”  

“I wasn’t interested.”

“You know what, don’t insult me.  I don’t care if you want to fuck some crackpot bottle blonde with a dead cat or not.  What I do care about is feeling like I’m alone on a case that we’re supposed to be handling as a team.  A case that I wouldn’t be handling at all, if I had my way.”  She inhaled sharply, self-righteousness flowing now as natural as breath itself. “A case that I personally would not even call a case.  And then, to be ganged up on, simply because you’re making puppy eyes at the local law enforcement.”

“I don’t make puppy eyes.”

“Yes, you most certainly do.”

“Do I make them at you?”  The question caught her off guard.  She’d been expecting more arguing.

“Yes,” she said.  “Sometimes.”  

She flashed on an image of them, his puppy eyes – warm and soft, their capacity for sorrow as unfathomable as the universe.  And not just any universe – his version of it.

“So, are you like, smoking now?”

The puppy was back to eating her shoes.

“What?”

“I can smell it on you.”

“I was tense because of our argument.  And stop smelling me.”

“I wasn’t arguing.  You were arguing.”

“Don’t make me want another one.  I already tossed them.”

“Cigarettes are bad for you.”

“I know that.”

“Lung cancer, emphysema –”

“I know what cigarettes do.  I’m a medical fucking doctor.”  

“How about a chocolate bar?  I hear sometimes sugar will stop the craving.”

“I’m not stopping for a chocolate bar. If I stop, I’m getting more cigarettes.”

She glanced down at the pointy nudging at her elbow; he was poking her with a chocolate bar.  There it was in its foiled, emulsified glory, aluminum underwrapping sparkling like the healing waters of Lourdes.  She tried not to look as overjoyed as she was.  She tried not to want it.  Trying not to want it was the Dana Scully Special.

“Where’d you get that?”

“Vending machine at the motel before we left.”

“You don’t want it?”

“I got it for you.”  

She swished her tongue in her mouth to cut the anger in her saliva

before swallowing.  He unwrapped it and held it out to her lips.  She dipped her chin and bit off a perfect semi-circle.

“Thank you,” she mumbled, mouth full.  One eye squinted, tightening its reigns on the sweet, saccharine twinge of cheap chocolate.  A guttural hum vibrated in her throat and she quickly cleared her throat as if to erase it.  But it had drawn his eyes to her, she could feel him staring.

“Crickets,” she mumbled and cracked the window, as if to prove their existence.

“I’m sorry, you’re right,” he said.  “I should be more conscious of us seeming like a united front when there’s a third party.  You always have my back.  Even when you think my theories are crazy.”

“Which is always, Mulder.”  He was apologizing, she knew that.  She shook her head at herself, at this night, at the stupid town of Comity, population thirty eight thousand whatever lunatics.  “It’s fine.  Whatever.”

“It’s fine whatever?”

“I accept your apology.”

“Are you going to apologize too?”

“No.”

“Pull over.”

“No,” she said.  He grabbed the wheel and jerked it.  She yelped his name and depressed the brakes.  The car pulled to a stop on the side of the road and he put the shift into park.  He unbuckled, letting the belt snap at the window, and reached over her, torso draping over her lap.  She startled, trying to ignore the heat rising to meet the drip of his tie between her legs.  She considered asking what he was doing, considered telling him to keep doing it whatever it was.  She heard a strutting noise as he pulled the lever and the seat slid back abruptly on the tracks.  She bit back her smile as he sat straight up in his seat.

“Better?” he asked gently.

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

And now there was a certain kind of silence that happened between them once in a blue moon – proverbially and not astrologically speaking.  This kind of silence was fleeting but almost unbearable.  It was not the sort of transactional, logistical silence that was left at the end of rental car paperwork and directions. It was a small, intimate silence, independent of details, swathed in darkness and managed by the six-inch distance of the center console.  

Maybe this was why he was so rarely quiet.  Maybe he found this just as unbearable.  She tried not to look at him and waited for it to end, as it always inevitably and uneventfully did.  But he was tugging gently on her arm.  There they were.  The puppy eyes.

“What?” he asked innocently.  “Am I doing it?”

A tiny smile crept across her lips and she directed it out her own window and buried it in the deep overdramatic fog where he’d never find it.  But unexpectedly, the fog whispered something back.  You were jealous, she heard in her head.

“Switch with me,” she blurted out.  “My eyes are hurting.”

He obliged with the dull click of the door handle.  Her hair curled around her temples as soon as she stepped into the dampness.  He’d say it was Saturn opposing the sun.  She’d say it was the fucking humidity.  The air was steeped in the scent of wet soil, a poetic ideal seldom acknowledged for its association with metabolic by-processes, its scientific name seldom spoken by songwriters.  Petrichor.  From the Greek words for stone and something else.

He waited at the back of the car for her and pulled her into a hug as she crossed his path.  They were very much alone here.  She could see nothing but him, could hear nothing but his heartbeat and the croaking of small frogs. This was where he wanted to leave their conflict, where blades of grass would be found separated from their roots in the morning, dead and plastered to the blackened asphalt.  Here, where no one including them would ever find it again.

They moved toward each other as slowly as space rocks, bereft in gravity, the impending contact coincidental.  He came only so close, then stopped and bent forward, parting her hair with his fingers.  He landed the tip of his nose on the side of her neck.  The hairs on the back of her neck swayed as he breathed her in and her head lolled on its axis.  She licked the nervousness back off her lips, forced herself to speak.

“I’m not wearing perfume.  We established that already.  It wasn’t me.”  Her voice was low and proud, squished between their bodies.

“I know.  But you smell good.  I think it’s how you always smell but maybe it’s stronger due to the presence of Mars in Gemini, a pheromone-based –”

“Mulder.”

“– result of planetary alignment.  Because I read a bit about it and when Uranus is conjunct with –”

“I swear to God,” she warned, trying to break away from him as her ribs expanded and reached for his.  He resisted the backward press of her body against his hands.

“And when you have a crosspattern between Saturn and–”

Her hand suddenly got away from her, gripped the knot of his tie on its way to the side of his face.  It was a tongue first, teeth-clicking kiss, a tie-pulling, scalp-teasing kiss.  It was a don’t talk to me anymore kiss.  It was the kind of kiss it would take those teenagers decades to perfect.  It was an, I want to be the last person you’ve kissed, kind of kiss.  It was the kind of kiss she could not pretend not to want.

His hands took her as they had the car, rough and without apology.  They slipped down her neck, folded down her collar, skimmed the sides of her breasts on their way to her waist.  His mouth was doing what it always did to her – nagging, pulling, pushing – all of which worked better without words.  And soon the faint tingle of nicotine under her tongue was gone, the sweet syrup of the chocolate soaked up, and she could taste only Mulder.  He tasted salty and sunflowery, the essence of a field.  She realized she’d always expected him to taste of porn and tragedy.  

He lifted her at the waist and placed her on the trunk of the car, pulling her to the edge so that her knees squeezed his sides.  His mouth pressed into her, pressured her back onto her elbows.  Her blood quickened as her pelvis slid beneath her, caught between his hardness and the car’s.  Petrichor.  Ichor, that was it, the fluid in the veins of gods.  

Desire rumbled low in her throat as his thumbs slid up the insides of her thighs, pressing her trousers deep into the flesh of her legs, molding them into her.  He moved her lips with his own as he spoke.

“That sound is not just for chocolate, then.”

She paused, breathing, and looked from his smile to his eyes, tracing his charm back to his heart.  Detective White would not have had to push him away.  There would be other women who did not have to push him away.   But she did.  She tried, sitting up straight with her hands on his chest.  But he hovered between her legs, knocking his knees impatiently against the chassis, his fingers still squeezing the sides of her waist.

She held his face close, giving time a chance to partially mend the boundary she’d blown through somewhere back around that stop sign.  When she finally looked up, he flinched, regarding her raised lashes as cautiously as freshly sharpened knives.  He’d been silent nineteen seconds.  Twenty.  A record.  Perhaps she would keep this trick in her back pocket.

“I can’t,” she told him, her voice thick and deep.

“Then why did you?” he asked.  His voice was raspy, sucked dry, given in sacrifice to hers.

“I didn’t,” she said, giving his tie a pat and slinking down off the trunk.  Her body brushed against him like a match before it reached the ground and moved toward the passenger seat.  “The planets did.  And from what I understand, it’s a pretty rare formation, so it’ll probably never happen again.”


End file.
